Haskell Weekly News: September 26, 2009

Welcome to issue 133 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

This week, we have a few new libraries, some interesting discussion about
EDSLs, a comment from Oleg, and dons extolling the virtues of SCIENCE! On
the new HWN software front, I've decided to jump right into something I had
planned for far further down the development chain. Specifically, rather than
scraping GMane for messages, I've been working on a way to grab the messages
directly from the mailing-lists. I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to create
links as they are now for the messages, but one crisis at a time. Till next
week, here's the Haskell Weekly News!

Announcements

epoll
bindings 0.2. Toralf Wittner
announced
the release of epoll bindings 0.2 available here. Epoll is an
I/O event notification facility for Linux similar to poll but with good
scaling characteristics. This release adds a buffer abstraction on top
of the existing low-level bindings, so client code can write and read
to buffers without having to deal directly with the underlying epoll
event handling.

diagrams 0.2.1, and planned major improvements. Brent Yorgey
announced
version 0.2.1 of the diagrams library, available now on Hackage. This
minor release which fixes a few bugs and adds a few new combinators,
most notably a grid layout combinator contributed by Ganesh Sittampalam.

Workflow-0.5.5, TCache-0.6.4 RefSerialize-0.2.4. Alberto G. Corona
announced
Workflow 0.5.5. Workflow provides a monad transformer that encapsulates any
monad in a state monad that bring automatic state logging and recovery. A
workflow can be viewed as a thread that persist across planeed or unplanned
application shutdowns. When recovering the execution is resumed at the
last action that was logged. The process continues at the same state as
if not interruption took place.

graphviz-2999.5.1.1. Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
announced
version 2999.5.1.1 of the graphviz
library. This is another bug-fix release, fixing the problem spotted
by Kathleen Fisher where Dot keywords need to be explicitly quoted if
used as labels, etc. There is no change to the API.

Darcs Hacking Sprint - 14-15 November Vienna. Eric Kow
announced
the third Darcs Hacking Sprint. Which will take place 14-15 November,
2009 at the University of Technology, Vienna, Austria. Anybody who wants
to hack on Darcs (or Camp, Focal, SO6, etc) -- Beginners especially --
are welcome!

2nd CFP: TLDI 2010. Andrew Kennedy
announced
a second call for papers for TLDI2010, the Types in Language Design and
Implementation Workshop.

darcs 2.3.1: better docs, fewer bugs. Reinier Lamers
announced
a new stable version of darcs, with bugfixes from 2.3.0, improved
documentation, and removal of the old autoconf build system.

Discussion

Monad Tutorial in C++. Adrian May
wrote
a tutorial about monads in some other niche language...

Beginning of a meta-Haskell. Oleg
-- as
if he needs any introduction -- commented on things
far above my ability to understand. Evidently, however, it
involves extensible, modular interpreters in the ``tagless
final'' style. It was a reply to an earlier thread here.

An issue with EDSLs in the ``finally tagless'' tradition. Brad
Larsen
talked
about his run in with the
expression problem while experimenting with EDSLs.

Blog noise

Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Blog posts from people new to the Haskell community are marked
with >>>, be sure to welcome them!

Quotes of the Week

ksf: (But if (on the other hand)) (I
think only a number in general (whether it be five or a hundred)) (this
thought is rather the representation of a method (whereby a multiplicity
(for instance a thousand) may be represented (in an image in conformity
with a certain concept)) than the image itself.

dons:
ah, via the magic of SCIENCE

dobblego: many of my
colleagues used to be [fond of ruby] as well until I was let loose on
them